Ray Bradbury: Science Fiction's First Great Humanist

Author of The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Fahrenheit 451, and more, Ray Bradbury died today at the age of 91.

Chances are good that science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who died today at 91 in Southern California, would not like how he's referred to in his many flowering obituaries. Bradbury famously, and consistently, resisted the title of "science fiction writer." Aside from his most well-known work, 1953's Fahrenheit 451, the prolific author and screenwriter claimed to have penned mostly fantasies—stories filled with impossible events.

He had a point. Something Wicked This Way Comes, his novel about a sinister traveling carnival, is as full of sorcery as the Harry Potter franchise. Even The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), both respected sci-fi classics, are uninterested in how technology might one day work. For Bradbury, Mars was a place, as good as any, to face your mortality. The future was more a setting for fables of human frailty and surprising strength than an invitation to forecast new and wondrous inventions. The thermodynamics of rockets and rayguns were someone else's daydream, and someone else's problem.

Yet, with all apologies to Bradbury, his legacy will always be in science fiction. And the fact that being associated with sci-fi chafed him is, perhaps, the best way into his unique contribution, which stands apart from the titans of the genre. Jules Verne was a prophet of submarines and moon shots. H.G. Wells predicted weapons of mass destruction, particularly the indiscriminate horror of chemical warfare. Arthur C. Clarke, among other things, was the father of the geostationary satellite. Isaac Asimov's laws of robotics continue to frame debates about ethical robots. These were studious, science-minded thinkers. Bradbury, meanwhile, was too busy imagining the petty insecurities poisoning a Martian marriage, or the mindless, heart-breaking routines of a robotic house whose owners are long-dead victims of a global nuclear war, to bother planting a flag in any single device or principle.

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What Bradbury leaves to sci-fi is a commitment to story first and science later—or never. He didn't write sprawling space operas. He traded acts of derring-do for explorations of tragedy, set in strange, surreal environments. His astronauts are as competent as anyone walking the decks of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Only, instead of puzzling their way out of quantum mechanical deathtraps, Bradbury's explorers tend to die. They tumble towards lethal reentry in a wrecked space station, or lose their minds in the jungles of Venus and commit suicide.

Although Bradbury's work is often noted for nostalgic callbacks to his small town, pre-WWII upbringing (he was born in 1920), with porches and summer breezes appearing inexplicably across gulfs of time and space, his earlier, more seminal stories are rarely quaint. In The Illustrated Man, the classic messiah trope is overturned as the would-be liberator of forced quarantine camps is accidentally killed by the prisoners we expect him to save.

A sense of loss prowls through even his most upbeat work. The sole episode of The Twilight Zone that Bradbury wrote, 1962's "I Sing the Body Electric," is the story of a little girl learning to love her new, robotic grandmother, after the death of her flesh-and-blood mother. The machine wins her over by being what the mother was not—immortal (specifically, by diving in front of a van hurtling toward here, and surviving). It's a perfectly happy, and unsettling, ending.

Science fiction will remember Bradbury as its first great humanist. The rest of the world (and especially high school English students) will most likely remember him for Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian vision of a future where knowledge is abhorred and being an intellectual is a capital offense. There are flamethrowers and betrayals and whispers of science fiction rebellion. But foremost it's a story of people, and their fears.

Bradbury, again, isn't like his peers. His legacy isn't a prediction that proved correct. It's the one we hope never will.

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